Awards & Scholarships

I am honored to be given this award: I enjoy my life’s work of teaching, research and editing and am very happy to be selected for this honor.  I plan to continue contributing to AIME and TMS for many years to come!

David E. Laughlin, the ALCOA Professor of Physical Metalurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has been elected "Fellow of the TMS Society" and will be inducted at its annual meeting in March of 2008.

He was cited for excellence in teaching, research, as well as outstanding service as editor of Metallurgical and Materials Transactions for the past twenty-five years. Laughlin also has been recognized at CMU for his teaching with the "Teare Award" in 1999 and a CIT "Outstanding Research Award" in 2003. The CIT award was given to Dr. Laughlin, along with David Lambeth, for their work with Dr. Li-Lien Lee on the invention of NiAl and other B2 structured underlayers for magnetic recording.

Laughlin is a 1969 graduate of Drexel University and received his PhD from MIT in 1973. He has worked on various phase transformations in the solid state, such a spinodal decomposition and atomic ordering, and has for the past twenty years worked on magnetic recording media.

Currently, with DSSC Director Dr. Zhu, he is working on developing smaller grain size media, on the reduction of the use of Ru in media, on crystalline magnetic soft underlayers, and on the development of viable Ll0 thin films for future recording media.

Laughlin teaches an undergraduate and graduate course on magnetic materials (with Prof. McHenry) and graduate courses on Phase Transformations and the Structure of Materials. He and his wife Diane are the proud and busy grandparents of eight youngsters.